IBM® Rational® DOORS® Next Generation is a requirements management tool that you can use to capture, trace, analyze, and manage changes to information. It builds on the Rational DOORS 9 rich client and the Rational Requirements Composer web client.

Rational DOORS Next Generation includes a rich client and a web client. You can use the rich client to quickly create and manage business requirements. In the web client, you can further define, elicit, capture, elaborate, discuss, and review requirements and artifacts.

The rich client is based on IBM Rational DOORS 9, and the web client is based on IBM Rational Requirements Composer.

It runs on the Jazz™ platform. This product is the first step in the process to bring Rational DOORS more fully into the requirements management (RM) space of the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management, where it can integrate with Rational tools in other spaces, such as change and configuration management (CCM) and quality management (QM).

Rational DOORS Next Generation can also integrate with third-party products.

IBM® Rational® Focal Point™ provides market - and business-driven product and portfolio management - helping executives and teams to make the right decisions to deliver business, customer and market value.

Here are some highlights of Rational Focal Point, but don't forget to check out the demo below: Demo

- Capture inputs from customers, analysts, market research, and internal stakeholders and prioritize on which ones will provide the most value to the business.- Utilize visualization, prioritization, and unique road mapping and planning capabilities to ensure that plans are innovative, valuable and achievable.- Centralize information key to decision-making, status reporting and portfolio reviews to escape the chaos of managing data in emails, documents, and spreadsheets; speeding the ability to respond to changing market and business conditions.- Overcome the influence of the loudest voice in the room and use objective information to support decision making.- Reduce risk and improve cost estimations of investments by modeling financial and market impacts and by performing scenario, statistical and financial analysis.- Integrate enterprise architecture plans and project execution into portfolio management to ensure enterprise and project-level decisions are aligned with financial and market needs.- Quickly realize the benefits of Product and Portfolio Management and reduce costs of implementations by utilizing pre-defined configurations based on best practices.

Check out the demo and learn how IBM Rational Focal Point helps organizations achieve their overall company goals. Project portfolio management can be described as methods for analyzing and collectively managing a group of current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. This demo explains how Rational Focal Point provides visibility into each project's total expected cost, consumption of resources, expected timeline, benefits to be realized, and relationship or inter-dependencies with other projects in the portfolio.

IBM® Rational® DOORS® Web Access enables stakeholders across your organization immediate access to the latest project requirements and traceability relationships. Rational DOORS Web Access provides secure, zero-footprint access to the central DOORS repository to enable stakeholders such as business users, developers, QA, marketing, and suppliers to stay up-to-date with the latest project requirements -- across the project and around the world. Take a closer look at how DOORS Web Access provides clear visibility into requirements and traceability relationships using the DOORS desktop client.

Optim™ Performance Manager for DB2® for Linux®, UNIX®, and Windows® boasts a whole new architecture that includes modern browser-based user interfaces which provide system health overviews and detailed diagnostics to isolate the source of emergent problems. It provides performance analysis and tuning for managing DB2 systems using an easy to use web interface.

You should check out these demos to get started on the basics. It is a really cool product.

IBM Optim Performance Manager 4.1.1.0, Part 1: Install the product

Part 1 of this demo series describes IBM Optim Performance Manager 4.1.1.0 architecture and packaging, and how to install the product. Part 2 describes the Extended Insight architecture, and how to install and configure the Extended Insight client.

The IBM Software Development Kit for Linux on POWER (SDK) is a free, Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The SDK integrates C/C++ source development with the Advance Toolchain, Post-Link Optimization, and classic Linux performance analysis tools, including OProfile and Valgrind. The IBM SDK for Linux on POWER provides you with an all-in-one solution for developing software on Linux on POWER platforms.

This demo shows you how to access the SDK using a technique called X-Forwarding, which allows you to integrate the SDK interface to an interface running on your Linux desktop. It also shows you how to create a virtual desktop session on the POWER server and connect to it using either Linux or Microsoft® Windows® clients.

Backup and recovery of systems is extremely important! From an IT perspective, manual backup and recovery processes are tedious, error prone, and time consuming, therefore, they are not frequently implemented. As the volume of data increases, though, it becomes more difficult to back up and recover without longer downtime that impacts production applications. To help resolve these challenges in database backup, recovery, and data unload, IBM DB2 Advanced Recovery Solution for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows provides three distinct products: IBM DB2 Merge Backup, IBM DB2 Recovery Expert, and IBM InfoSphere Optim High Performance Unload.

Watch how database administrators at a fictitious company improves their backup and recovery strategies with an IBM DB2 advanced recovery solution. See how the team uses various Optim and DB2 tools to make their backup and recovery process faster, simpler, and more efficient. This recovery solution includes three distinct products: DB2 Merge Backup, DB2 Recovery Expert, and Optim High Performance Unload.

Check out this demo of IBM® Rational® AppScan and IBM Tivoli® Access Manager. Together, these 2 products complement each other. Tivoli Access Manager grants access to web applications and Rational AppScan ensures that these applications are scanned and tested for vulnerabilities. This application security solution allows companies to preemptively and actively protect applications from external and internal threats, increase efficiencies, support compliance and improve an organization's overall security posture. Organizations should not neglect the important step of securing their web applications, the users that access them, and the data they collect.

Visualization software from IBM provides the industry’s most comprehensive set of graphics products for creating highly graphical, interactive displays. User interface developers reduce development time and risk. End users understand their information better, and can react faster.

Some of the displays that the visualization products provide are Diagrams, Gantt Charts, Maps, Business dashboards, SCADA/HMI screens Telecom displays, Defense Maps and Charts.

Here is a short video that shows a variety of IBM ILOG Visualization products in action, including IBM ILOG JViews Enterprise and IBM ILOG Elixir Enterprise. See for yourself how the user interfaces you build for your customers can be intuitive and engaging!

This is a really cool product! A follow-on to DB2 Performance Expert,Optim Performance Manager Extended Edition provides a comprehensive, proactive performance management solution for database applications. You can use Optim Performance Manager Extended Edition to identify, diagnose, solve and prevent performance problems before they impact the business.

In this demo, check out how the Extended Insight capability of Optim™ Performance Manager Extended Edition enables database administrators to understand where database transactions, workloads, and SQL requests are spending their time, such as in the database server, the network, or in the application server. This demo provides tips and techniques for using the Extended Insight dashboard.

A month ago I kicked off a blog on Cognos's Analytic Applications - Adaptive Application Framework Version 8.4 product. Here is part 4, that discusses Creating calculations and filters.

Let's review what we discussed just to level the playing field. Then we will get into the next demo:

IBM Cognos Analytic Applications deliver ready-made or packaged analytics using acommon business model that assesses performance of specific functional domains,which include finance, customer, supply chain and workforce. The applications helpour customers gain insight into their performance faster and far more cost-effectivelythan if they were to build it themselves. In addition, with a common business model foranalysis, customers can extend the point of analysis through shared KPI’s that eitherdeepen or extend their assessment of performance, either departmentally orcross-departmentally.

The Congos Adaptive Application Framework (AAF), meanwhile, is the application’smanagement model backbone, and allows organizations to adapt, or modifyreporting and analysis through a configurable process completed via a single touchpoint. The approach uses a drag and drop GUI to automate and streamline themanagement and implementation of changes, as well as seamlessly synchronizethe generation of core components of the application’s pre-built sourcings,warehouse, semantic and reporting layer.

The Adaptive Application Framework (AAF) lets you design a Warehouse model, define the ETL, and create a Framework Manager model for reporting purposes. Watch this demo to learn how to create two new calculations and a stand-alone filter in the Target Model.

A couple of weeks ago I kicked off a blog on Cognos's Analytic Applications - Adaptive Application Framework Version 8.4 product. Here is part 3, that discusses creating a custom hierarchy

Let's review what we discussed last time and then get into the next demo:

IBM Cognos Analytic Applications deliver ready-made or packaged analytics using acommon business model that assesses performance of specific functional domains,which include finance, customer, supply chain and workforce. The applications helpour customers gain insight into their performance faster and far more cost-effectivelythan if they were to build it themselves. In addition, with a common business model foranalysis, customers can extend the point of analysis through shared KPI’s that eitherdeepen or extend their assessment of performance, either departmentally orcross-departmentally.

The Congos Adaptive Application Framework (AAF), meanwhile, is the application’smanagement model backbone, and allows organizations to adapt, or modifyreporting and analysis through a configurable process completed via a single touchpoint. The approach uses a drag and drop GUI to automate and streamline themanagement and implementation of changes, as well as seamlessly synchronizethe generation of core components of the application’s pre-built sourcings,warehouse, semantic and reporting layer.

The Adaptive Application Framework (AAF) lets you design a Warehouse model, define the ETL, and create a Framework Manager model for reporting purposes. Watch the steps to learn how to create a new hierarchy to an existing dimension as well as set the member caption role to display the proper fields at report time.

A couple of weeks ago I kicked off a blog on Cognos's Analytic Applications - Adaptive Application Framework Version 8.4 product. Here is part 2, that discusses Creating a new dimension from a non-ERP data source.

Let's review what we discussed last time and then get into the next demo:

IBM Cognos Analytic Applications deliver ready-made or packaged analytics using acommon business model that assesses performance of specific functional domains,which include finance, customer, supply chain and workforce. The applications helpour customers gain insight into their performance faster and far more cost-effectivelythan if they were to build it themselves. In addition, with a common business model foranalysis, customers can extend the point of analysis through shared KPI’s that eitherdeepen or extend their assessment of performance, either departmentally orcross-departmentally.

The Congos Adaptive Application Framework (AAF), meanwhile, is the application’smanagement model backbone, and allows organizations to adapt, or modifyreporting and analysis through a configurable process completed via a single touchpoint. The approach uses a drag and drop GUI to automate and streamline themanagement and implementation of changes, as well as seamlessly synchronizethe generation of core components of the application’s pre-built sourcings,warehouse, semantic and reporting layer.

This just out! Spread the word and check out the Rational Focal Point Demo. It's all part of creating a smarter planet through software!

IBM technology drives the Chevrolet Volt

With help from Rational, General Motors is transforming its organization and the way it develops and delivers cars.GM engineers used Rational solutions to develop critical electronic controls for the Volt's innovative battery system, electric drive unit, and cabin electronics. The vehicle's unique propulsion system required the design of an unprecedented "system of systems," centered on software that seamlessly integrates the Volt's battery pack with its electric drive system. IBM Rational software solutions were also used to help GM engineers model the interactions of the Volt's embedded systems, helping to increase the quality and efficiency. To promote collaboration between global engineering teams, IBM is helping GM standardize their vehicle design on fewer software tools and a common design process, as well as helping them manage change throughout the product development process.The result of GM's investment in solutions from IBM Rational? Accelerated response to consumer demands and compression of the time it takes to develop a new vehicle, from the auto industry average of five to 10 years, or longer, to 29 months!

Learn how IBM Rational Focal Point helps organizations achieve their overall company goals. Project portfolio management can be described as methods for analyzing and collectively managing a group of current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. This demo explains how Rational Focal Point provides visibility into each project's total expected cost, consumption of resources, expected timeline, benefits to be realized, and relationship or inter-dependencies with other projects in the portfolio.